The Empress of India (33 page)

“The what?” Pin asked. “They’re going to fight the what?”

“Thuggees,” the Codger repeated. “That’s what the other bloke called them. He said it several times. Thuggees.”

“I thought they were all killed off many years ago,” said Pin.

“That’s what the professor said. But apparently they ain’t. Who are they, then, when they’re at home?”

“A vicious gang of murderers. They made a religion out of theft and murder.”

“I got some acquaintances like that,” commented Cooley the Pup.

Pin considered. “No profit in staying here,” he said. “We’d best follow along behind them and see which way the wind blows. Perhaps Moriarty and I are both trying to prevent the gold from being removed by some third party.”

“Now, wouldn’t that be something?” commented the Artful Codger.

“Teaming up with the professor,” said Cooley. “Now, that would be—”

Dr. Pin Dok Low glared at him.

“—wrong,” he finished hastily. “That would be wrong. Interesting, but wrong.”

Lieutenant McPride gave one last pull and the inner rim of the porthole frame came free of the wall, sprang from McPride’s hand, and bounced around the room, narrowly missing General St. Yves. “Sorry, sir,” he said. He dropped the twisted and bent spoon he had been using and pushed at the porthole itself. It resisted his efforts at first, but then budged slowly and grudgingly outward.

Lieutenant McPride fell back, exhausted, and Lieutenant Pinton took over for the final push. It took another few minutes before the brass porthole, mount and all, was pushed out and fell with a clatter to the deck below.

Pinton stepped back and examined what he and McPride had wrought. “It still seems a mite small,” he said.

“I think you’re the, ah, slenderest of us, Lieutenant,” St. Yves said. “If you can’t make it through, then none of us can.”

“I’ll give it a try, sir,” Pinton said. “If we could move the desk over to the hole so I don’t have to balance in midair while I’m trying to pull myself through, it might help.”

They pushed the desk over and moved all the papers, a box of cigars, and a small ornate jar of snuff off the desktop. Lieutenant Pinton took his jacket off, climbed up on the desk, and stuck his head through the porthole. Then he backed out again. “It’s my shoulders, sir,” he said apologetically. “I always thought of them as being too narrow, but now it seems they’re not narrow enough.”

“Are we b-bereft of options, then?” asked General St. Yves. “There must be some way we can escape this confounded room.”

“Perhaps if I put one arm through first . . .” said Pinton, considering the hole. He stretched out his right arm and thrust it through the hole, followed by his head. “By God, sir,” he called from the outside. “I think this might do it!”

Pinton continued wiggling and squirming and pushing and pulling, until he succeeded in getting his body through the hole and fell, shoulder first, on the promenade deck below. He stood up and peered back inside. “I’ve done it, sir!” he announced.

“So we see,” said St. Yves. “Can you—”

“Yes, sir; I’ll go right around and see about freeing the door.”

“You’re cut,” St. Yves said, seeing blood running down the lieutenant’s arm.

“Nothing, sir. Just a scrape. Be right there, sir.” And he ran around to the corridor.

A few moments later those inside the room heard some thumping, scraping, and cursing from outside the door, and then it was opened. “It was a bolt, sir,” said Lieutenant Pinton, hefting a three-inch-long bolt.

Captain Iskansen was the first out the door. With a “Got to get to the bridge. Thank you, Lieutenant,” he was off down the deck and up the nearest ladder.

“Well, gentlemen,” said General St. Yves. “We’d better go and see how much damage these chaps have been able to do, and set it to rights.”

“Yes, sir,” his lieutenants said.

“And perhaps do a bit of damage of our own,” added Lieutenant McPride.

I ’listed at home for a lancer,
Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
—A. E. Housman

A
battle was being waged between six Lancers and an indefinite number of Thuggees on the deck holding the gold vault. A slow battle, a battle in miniature, with no bugles sounding the charge, no roar of cannon, no advance at full gallop with lances down, no shouted orders to dismount and form a skirmish line; but deadly nonetheless.

Six of the Lancers were in the guardroom, crouching behind an overturned table in the doorway two at a time, peeking out at the corridor, and firing their Martini-Henry carbines at whatever moved. One of their number—the guard who had been on duty at the far end of the corridor—now lay dead at his post, a Thuggee scarf tight around his neck.

About a dozen Phansigar were blocking both ends of the corridor,
hiding behind an overturned couch at one end and a barricade of fifty-pound bags of rice at the other. The six of the Duke’s Own were not interested in fighting their way out of the guardroom. It was more important to remain and keep the guns and ammunition stored there out of the hands of their opponents.

All was quiet when Moriarty and his passel arrived at the disputed deck. They rounded a corner in the corridor and saw several men in stewards’ white crouching behind an overturned couch about twenty feet in front of them, exchanging shots and insulting remarks with some of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own in the guardroom. The electrical lights were still shining brightly in front of the gold vault, and the outer door to the vault was still open. As yet there was no sign that the Thuggees had made any attempt to remove the gold, or even open the inner door. Moriarty waved his group back out of sight around the corner before the Thuggees noticed them.

“Things seem to be at an impasse,” Moran commented. “The enemy’s advance has stalled.”

“It’ll pick up again if that ship gets here,” said Peter. “If there is a ship.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Moriarty said. “Which means we’d better do something with reasonable speed.”

“Any ideas?” Colonel Moran asked, tight-lipped. “I don’t fancy advancing into superior firepower. A flanking attack would be preferable. Sneak up on them.”

“How do you sneak up on them in a corridor?” Peter asked.

“The professor’s the tactician,” Moran told him. “Ask him. I just do as I’m ordered.”

“I’d like to thank you for that profound statement of confidence,” Moriarty said. “But you’re the military man. What did they teach you at Sandhurst besides looting and commissary?”

“Artillery,” Moran told him. “I can plot a trajectory with the best of ’em.”

“Very useful,” Moriarty agreed.

“Speed?” Margaret reminded them.

The door to the deck behind them swung open, and they whirled and pointed various weapons at the three men who came through until they saw that the newcomers were not Phansigar.

“Perhaps we might be of some use,” said the tallest of the three. “I am Dr. Pin Dok Low. These two gentlemen are my assistants.”

Moriarty silently examined the three men, pausing for a long moment to look hard at Pin Dok Low. For a second he seemed about to say something, and then he didn’t. Colonel Moran thought that Moriarty looked vaguely puzzled, except that was clearly impossible. Professor Moriarty was never puzzled by anything, no way.

“Welcome to our little farrago,” said Peter Collins. “You don’t happen to have a small cannon anywhere about your person, do you?”

“My walking stick,” said Pin, displaying the gold-headed object in question, “has a powerful air gun concealed in its shaft. Unfortunately, it takes entirely too long to reload and pump up the air pressure to make it more than a one-shot weapon. However”—he reached down and took the gold-banded tip off the bottom of the stick—“we may as well have the benefit of that one shot.”

“Well.” Peter turned back to Moriarty and asked the inevitable question. “What’s our plan?”

“I suggest,” said Moriarty, “that we rush them in the dark.”

“What dark?” Moran asked. “Those damn electrical lights are as bright a the midday sun. Brighter.”

“Notice the conduit that runs along the ceiling by the right-hand wall,” Moriarty said, pointing to the long tube, which had been painted to blend in with the light green of the ceiling. “Unless I am mistaken, it holds the two wires necessary to supply electricity to the lamps. If we cut the wires, it will suddenly be very dark.”

“Say,” said Cooley the Pup. “Won’t the electricity fall out?”

Moriarty looked at him for a long moment, and then said, “No.”

“Make it dark,” Peter said. “And I’ll fire a flare at them. And then we’ll go.”

“Good thinking,” Colonel Moran agreed.

One of the Phansigar in the corridor yelled an urgent call in liquid and strident syllables. Another replied, longer and louder.

Moran peered around the corner and then pulled back as a bullet whizzed by. “The beggars are up to something. I wonder what they’re saying.”

“Something about a bomb,” Margaret told him. “Rolling a bomb, I think.”

“Rolling?”

“I think so. It sounded like he yelled, ‘Get back, something . . . something . . . roll the bomb.’ ”

“Glad you speak the language,” Moriarty said. “We’d better get out there.”

“Let’s do it,” said Moran.

“You,” Moriarty said, pointing to Margaret, “will stay here. If anyone rounds the corner and it isn’t one of us, shoot him. Can you do that?”

“I think so,” she said.

“It isn’t as easy to shoot someone as is popularly imagined,” Moriarty told her. “Physically it is not difficult—you point the gun and pull the trigger. But the mind rebels against taking a life. But if one of them does get away from us he will try to bring reinforcements, and he will either go through you or around you. He must not succeed.”

“I’ll do what I must,” Margaret said, clutching the little derringer tightly in her hand.

“So you will,” said Moriarty. “Well, come my friends. This should be over very quickly, one way or another.”

Another shot came from inside the guardroom.

Moriarty reached up with the tip of his sword-cane and pried the conduit away from the wall. “Are you ready, Mr. Collins?”

Peter opened the flare gun and dropped a cartridge into the breach, slammed it closed, and then flattened himself against the wall and peered around the corner. “All set,” he said.

“Colonel Moran?”

“Reminds me of the Pawamatti campaign,” the colonel said, swishing his loaded cane through the air and then crouching by the corner. “On a smaller scale, of course. I would suggest a bit of loud yelling and screaming as we advance. It disheartens your adversaries, or so it is believed.”

“Screaming it is,” Peter agreed.

“Dr., ah, Pin?” Moriarty asked.

Pin looked at his two sidemen. The Artful Codger adjusted his knuckle dusters and nodded. Cooley the Pup held his knife at belly level and jabbed experimentally. “I think, in the dark . . .” he said.

“We’re set to go,” Pin said.

“One . . . two . . . three . . . !” Moriarty whispered. On “three” he twisted his sword in the conduit and severed the wire. A bright spark arced out from the tip of his blade, and then all was black.

Peter threw himself out past the bend in the corridor and fired the flare gun, sending a streak of red flame bouncing along from one wall to the other, off the ceiling and floor, until it lodged in a sack of rice on the far side of the corridor, past the guardroom door, and burst into a bright red ball of fire. While Peter paused to reload the flare gun, he felt rather than saw his companions race by him down the corridor. One of them—Peter thought it was Colonel Moran—let out a great cry of, “God for Harry, England, and St. George!” Someone else was yelling something that sounded like, “Bullocks and mare’s blood!” but might have been something else.

The closest group of Thuggees were able to let off two shots and two weirdly high-pitched screams before they went down under the sudden onslaught. The group of white-clad marauders farther down the corridor fired a few rounds into the mass of fighting men, not seeming to care
who they hit, and then rushed forward to join in the melee, screaming their own screams and brandishing long, curved knives that gleamed wickedly in the light of the single oil lamp that was produced by one of the guards, who was peering out from the guardroom doorway.

Margaret, hardly knowing what she did or why, followed along slightly behind her companions, inching along the wall to keep out of their way, the little derringer held before her like a talisman.

Several more shots rang out, and Moriarty found himself grappling with a man who seemed intent on cutting his nose off. The professor went rapidly through the four baritsu codas of Standing Frog, Reaping Rice Farmer, Leaping Lizard, and Death Comes Calmly, suffering a cut on the shoulder before he was able to twist around and insert the point of his sword neatly between the man’s third and fourth rib under the heart. His antagonist sighed loudly, threw his knife heedlessly into the air, and sank to the floor.